Press Release
MP Highlights The Scourge Of Fresh Water and Sanitation
And praises our local schools Rosehall High & St Mary’s for their outstanding effort
Local MP Tom Clarke speaking in the Hose of Commons during an International Debate said that his speech lasted 15 minutes during which 60 people would have died because of poor water and sanitation. With Government funding UNICEF is helping 500,000 people get access to water in eight states and piloting innovative low-cost sanitation initiatives.
The intention in millennium development goal 7 is to halve the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by the target time of 2015.
People are dying from water-related disease every 15 seconds. Clean water is life; foul water is death. One billion people globally lack access to safe water, and 2.6 billion people lack access to sanitation, and 443 million school days are lost globally each year to the illness. Half the world’s hospital beds are taken up with people suffering from water-borne diseases
New hospitals will remain full and new schools could remain empty unless water and sanitation are included in the list of essential services that are given priority nationally. Water and sanitation are also important to improving the lives and status of women.
I believe that the issues raised in this important debate go beyond even Governments, and so I want to refer to development education. The vast majority of the British people are supportive of the things that we want to do in terms of the provision of clean water and proper sanitation. For that reason, I was proud that one of the main secondary schools in my constituency, Rosehall high school, working with a nearby primary school, St. Mary’s, has involved itself in a twinning link with a little village in Malawi.
When I visited the school recently, we saw slides that showed places where water had not been provided and where people had to walk 5 miles to obtain it, and because of the help that the two schools have been able to give through fundraising and keeping in touch with that village, water is now provided in those areas. I am proud of the schools for their outstanding effort.
The UK is striving to ensure that our commitments on basic services and on doubling our water spend in Africa by 2007-08 are achieved, and that our spend, should then doubled again to £200 million by 2010-11. We all accept, however, that current trends suggest that we will simply not meet the target in sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria has the largest slum populations in Africa and less than half the rural population there has access to an improved water source.
We need a global action plan on water and sanitation. In Ethiopia there is evidence to show how better financing can strengthen human security and provide opportunities for growth, for the benefit of poor people in Ethiopia and the wider Nile region.
In Pakistan, half the girls who drop out of school do so because of a lack of access to latrines. That underlines the point that the problem of water and sanitation links in to the other problems that we want to deal with, such as health care, infant mortality, maternal mortality and education.
The good news is that in the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan, in 2006-07 provided clean drinking water for 170,000 people and proper sanitation for 225,000 people. Recently, that excellent organisation Results UK, which is doing wonderful work in this field and particularly on tuberculosis, encouraged a number of us, to visit India.
Although we were focusing on tuberculosis, it was obvious to us that the issue of water and sanitation was pivotal in trying to find a solution to that problem. The fact is that 1,000 people die of tuberculosis in India every day. Even if we improve water and sanitation, we will not solve the problem exclusively through that means.
At any one time, half the people in the developing world suffer from one or more of the diseases associated with inadequate water supply provision. The British Government promote water sustainability in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. Given the impact that climate change is likely to have on low-lying areas of the sub-continent, it is important that we have a strategy to deal with such 3 matters. In India, we heard of WaterAid’s contribution. It has both rural and urban projects across India and helps to promote sanitation by targeting some of the country’s most vulnerable communities.
We heard a lot about its good work in Bangalore and it is making an important contribution to achieving the millennium development goals in those areas.
The challenge to us all goes further than that. Development education means that we want more schools, individuals, churches and voluntary organisations to take the view that together we can help the world’s poorest people. It is vital, for all the reasons that have been given, that we achieve the millennium development goals and more.